“Climate change not as threatening to planet as previously thought, new research suggests”

Oh my.  If this proves to be true, will Al Gore feel obligated to fly around in private jets even more than he currently does?

“Climate change not as threatening to planet as previously thought, new research suggests”

“Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C may still be possible”

Personally, I’m neither a climate-change zealot nor a climate-change skeptic, and I’m certainly not opposed to attempting to clean up our environment and to keep it clean.  What worries me is when some folks seek to leverage the issue of climate change in order to accumulate more power for the State and to transfer wealth from developed nations to third-world kleptocracies.

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A bit more from the eminent geneticist Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D.:

“To my surprise, I began to realize there were pointers to the existence of something outside of nature that came from nature itself.  First of all:  There is something instead of nothing.  There’s no reason why that should be.  Then there’s the Big Bang, the fact that the universe had a beginning about 13.7 billion years ago in an unimaginable flash where the universe — at that time smaller than a golf ball — exploded and has been blowing itself apart ever since as the galaxies receded from each other and continue to do so today.  Our laws of physics and mathematics can’t really deal with what happened before that.  They break down.  So, doesn’t that cry out for an explanation?

“Have we observed nature to create itself?  I don’t think so.  That seems almost, by definition, to imply a Creator who must be outside of nature and, frankly, must be outside of time and space.  Otherwise, you have not solved the problem of who created the Creator.  As soon as you admit to the idea that the Creator has to be outside of time, then that so-called infinite-regress problem goes away.

“Another clue from nature: Physicist Eugene Wigner’s phrase ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ — I was a student of physical chemistry — I used those equations with the full confidence that they describe the behavior of matter and energy.  It never occurred to me to wonder why they would work, and why should they?  Why should gravity follow an inverse square law?  There’s no reason that should be the case, but it’s true.  This begins to make you think that a Creator who’s outside of time and space is also a pretty darn good mathematician.  And apparently also a pretty good physicist; there is this amazing observation, just coming to light in the last thirty years, that the constants which determine the way in which matter and energy behave — things like the gravitational constant — have been precisely tuned to take on values that are necessary in order for any meaningful complexity to exist in the universe — much less, life.

“If you take the gravitational constant and allow it to be just slightly weaker than it currently is, then, after the Big Bang, everything flies apart, and there’s never any coalescence of galaxies, stars, planets.  If the gravitational constant were a little stronger, just by a tiny bit, one part in a billion, then things come together a little too soon.  The Big Bang is followed by a Big Crunch before we humans ever show up.  That’s one of fifteen — fifteen — physical constants, which, if you tweak their values by a tiny fraction, I mean a very tiny fraction, means that the whole thing doesn’t work anymore.”

“Atheism is, in fact, the least rational of all choices.”

From “The Language of God: A Believer Looks at the Human Genome,” a lecture delivered on 3 December 2008 in New York City.  Eric Metaxas, ed., Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011), 309-310, 308.